Eclectic handmade jewelry often from recycled and unusual items with some personal rambling thrown in. Please visit my Etsy Store at TracyBell.etsy.com
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Sunday, April 10, 2016

A great class wth Jayne Redman

For the past five days I've been taking a class from Jayne Redman, if you ever get a chance to take one of her workshops just do it. The 5 days were spent breaking a million saw blades, my issue not Jaynes fault, cutting out steel blanking die and cutting various forms from copper.

This was my first little die cut from tool steel and then used to press out the copper shape.

Here's the piece of cut copper folded to looked like a rosebud.

For my second die I decided to go all out and try the hardest thing I could think of cutting out. I know you may not recognize this but it's a paisley outline. This took me the better part of four or five hours and many broken saw blades but I learned a lot and that's what class is about. Before this class I didn't have a great deal of sawing experience, let me tell ya, steel is a very unforgiving material.

This would be the saw blade grave yard and I'm sure the number would have been doubled if it weren't for my favorite Green Lyon Saw frame.

The next piece I cut was a box die I designed to see if the same shape could be flipped and used for the bottom so two halves out of the same die.

This is the progression of folding and rolling the hinges, it needs some refining but I'm very pleased with my first try at a hinged box.

We also cut out silhouette dies from some thick plexiglass, no blades broken because this is a huge blade.

When you put the die with copper and urethane into the press it into the cut plexiglass it puffs up the copper, this can also be cut with the die we cut out of steel as shown on the top right.

We then took the plexiglass silhouette die and put some wire shapes into it to create a pattern in our copper. This will be cut with the blanking die I just didn't get to it yet. I have some perfecting to do before this is done but it still shows the idea well and the possibilities are endless.

We also learned how to carve a design into plexiglass and push copper into it so the pattern is transferred into the copper. I forgot to get a photo of it so here's me wearing my scarf because I forgot my mask carving the plexiglass.

1 comment:

Thanks for sharing, I love what you did with the paisley pattern (I didn't recognize it, thought it resembled the wind).I took up silversmithing last year and also spoiled a lot of sawblades already. :)